Can the game detect if it crashed?

I was going into competitive and it crashed immediately. As the following pop-up window told me to, I sent the crash report to Blizzard. I reconnected right away. It turned out the game considered me leaving and suspended me from competitive mode for 10 minutes. I found this very unfair since the game should know I did not leave competitive game by choice.

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Fix your PC issues… not Buzzard’s fault

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What if there servers crash while players are in the middle of a comp game?

Unfortunately players could force crashes on the game so if it detected crashes and gave you a pass then players could probably make small script on their PC to intentionally make their PC unstable and cause a crash to get the free pass.

They might also be influenced to exploit bugs that cause crashes for all players to avoid a loss (this actually used to happen a lot)

By punishing players equally it ensures no-one intentionally tries to game the system, it’s unfortunately a case of the players who abuse these things spoiling these features for the innocent players.

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It’s impossible for the game to know if you left by choice or not. There are ways to force a program to stop or a network to fail, things as simple as flipping the power switch on the computer or the network router.

Yes, in your case the program crashed which can be detected by a companion program that watches for a crash… but there are also ways to force a program to crash.

It’s also not fair to the other players in a competitive multiplayer game if you continue operating on unstable hardware or an unstable network and continuously ruining games. Whether intentional or not, the match is ruined for 11 other people every time you leave a competitive game.

Then the match is cancelled, and all record of it is removed from all the players who were in it.

This is rare, though. Mostly when players get disconnected from a match and the problem is not on the player’s end, the problem is somewhere on the internet between them and Blizzard’s servers… in which case the players get punished, since this is indistinguishable from any other network failure.

If there are server issues they sometimes restore the losses of people who were kicked out.

Blizzard could probably make a system to tell when you crash however, that would be admitting you crashed and would also require measures to detect individuals causing crashes.

It’s a ton less effort to just call it the users fault.

Games can detect if they crash, but it’s also possible to intentionally induce crashes, so unfortunately it would still be exploitable.

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I’d say about 40% of my crashes were due to game errors and not pc errors.

Without seeing a stack trace you have no way of knowing that, and no proof of that claim. Simple fact is the software crashed. Unless you present some kind of evidence showing that it’s a hardware or OR issue, the user can not and should not be held responsible.

There are so many things wrong with this complete and utter BS claim that people keep throwing around.

Local network faults are easily diagnosable. “What’s that, I don’t even get an ARP response for what was the address I was using 5 seconds ago?.. oh, nothing sus there! /s”.

If the application can’t even reach the local gateway, then that’s a fair sign it’s not Blizzards fault. But when you can reach 30 other external hosts distributed across the world, but it lost an active session to only Blizzard’s service…
Hell, look at the World Cup last year when Aussies were constantly getting dropped from competitive (and only comp) - you’d have people streaming to Twitch getting disconnected - it was utterly comical.

… then it is the fault of either Blizzard or Blizzard’s direct upstream providers, and yes, Blizzard should have redundant upstream providers that don’t use the same physical infrastructure.

I do think Blizzard could and should take a little more responsibility with rolling back penalties when they have mass outages, but that’s hardly the situation the OP was involved in nor a general principle for dealing with unexpected disconnects.

However, you cannot rely on the client side application to provide reliable information when you run an online service. Hackers do exist, and once on person has written a good hack and made it available any cheater can run a script to cheat.

From the service provider’s point of view (in this case Blizzard), they can only trust what they can see from their end, not what the client claims happened. As such it doesn’t matter how well the client can recognize a network fault… the client cannot be relied on in this matter.

Do you really, honestly believe that someone - for the sake of Overwatch - is going to put in the effort to reverse-engineer a potentially encrypted proprietary protocol which can change every version, all so that they can freely disconnect from a game without penalty when they choose to, and that if they are even doing that that it isn’t going to be so rare that it can be manually investigated and penalised severely?

It’s such an outlier and out of the realms of realistic that we shouldn’t even be concerning ourselves with the likeliness it’s going to be a problem.

No, I really, honestly believe they would put that effort in so they can sell their work to cheaters. They already put incredible effort into wallhacks and aimbots, and seem to be able to sell those cheats for a very good price.

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Hello EPJ and welcome to the Overwatch forums. While it was not your intention to leave, crashing or disconnecting does negatively impact competitive games and causes matches to either cancel or leave a team a man down for the remainder of the match. Because of this penalties stand even if you crash and disconnect. This is done because it prevents deliberate leavers from having any means to bypass penalties and encourages those who encounter crashes or disconnections to stop playing Competitive Play and troubleshoot their issues. You can learn more about Blizzard’s policy about this here:

If you are getting this error dialog appearing…

…this is often due to outdated drivers or a conflicting program. Please follow these steps first if you have not already.

If nothing helps, please go ahead and start a web ticket and share those crash errors in the ticket. Please also remember to add your system files so that Blizzard can learn about your computer quickly.

Obtaining System Files: Obtaining System Files - Blizzard Support

Starting a web ticket: Contact Support - Blizzard Support


When servers crash the usual behavior is that both teams will be returned to the lobby and the message “Server closed due to an unexpected error” appears in the text chat and the match will immediately restart (often on a new map) with those players. The results of the crashed match is void.

Whether you intended to or not, your absence in the match ruined the game for 5 other people, and at your own fault. The only known current crash that is the fault of Blizzard is the “Rendering Device Has Been Lost” crash, and if you’re suffering from that, just play any of the many other game-modes available until it’s fixed.

Additionally, the game can’t tell if you’ve disconnected by choice (unplugging a wire) or by genuine disconnect, either of which are still your fault. And the game cannot tell if you crashed by error, or if you crashed by alt+f4.

Sure, I know how to find out that it was his PC that is causing the issue, but people generally do not allow others to remote into their PC to check it. They like to think they can OC their PC or do something to ‘improve’ the performance, only to discover that it causes issues.

One example comes to mind: One person I helped bought a liquid cooler for his processor, but never installed the software to control the performance of the liquid cooler. Another is a person who had a bad power supply.

I’ve been playing OW since it came out and have NEVER had the game crash.

Based on my experience, yes, it is your PC that is the issue if the game is crashing